New York
The new National Center for Postsecondary Research, based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, offered a glimpse this week of the course it will chart over the next few years.
Officials at the center, which opened in July, outlined on Wednesday key aspects of a research agenda that will concentrate on ways to reduce barriers to postsecondary education and increase college-completion rates.
In one project, researchers will work with Queensborough Community College, in Bayside, N.Y., and five other yet-to-be-determined colleges to study the effect that “learning communities” have on outcomes like student-retention and course-completion rates. In learning communities, groups of students take several related courses together and, theoretically, form support networks that boost retention and performance.
The new center also plans to work with the Florida community-college system, among others, to examine the impact of dual-enrollment programs, which allow high-school students to take college courses for both college and high-school credit.
Students participating in those studies will be randomly assigned to control groups and to the enhanced programs, so researchers can remove complicating factors, like student motivation, from the equation and better identify the true impact of the programs.
The work will be a collaborative effort involving researchers from the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, professors at Harvard and Princeton Universities, and MDRC, a social-policy research group. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences has awarded those groups a five-year, $9.8-million grant to support the postsecondary-research center.
Thomas R. Bailey, director of the new center as well as the Community College Research Center, outlined his plans on Wednesday to a group of community-college presidents, academics, and state higher-education officials gathered at his institution in New York City.
The center’s research will focus largely on two-year institutions.
“There has been more interest recently in what happens to students, especially low-income, low-skill students,” Mr. Bailey, who is also a professor at Teachers College, said in an interview. “I would have been surprised 10 years ago if an institution so focused on community colleges had won this grant.”
The postsecondary-research center opened just months before the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education released its report, which stated that community colleges would be key in educating the future work force and setting the educational system right.